Just refreshing my memory; it’s been a while. I’d been off the dance floor for almost exactly six months. No dance, no solo practice – not even listening to tango music, because it was too painful to hear it and not be able to dance.

So before diving in at the deep end at the Feast, I thought I’d better book a couple of privates to remind me about one or two of the finer points of technique – like how to embrace, walk and pivot …

Emma drew the short straw on the Sunday prior to the Feast. She had to somehow take a man who had been living in an entirely tangoless world for half a year and remind him how to dance.

There were two pieces of good news. First, she assured me that my body hadn’t forgotten tango. Indeed, Emma actually thought one element we’d been working on previously had somehow improved during my time-out! Second, there was no discomfort while dancing, which I found surprising given that I do still have a certain amount of discomfort in everyday activities. The magic of tango, perhaps!

The session was an object lesson in just how much skill teaching can take. Not making me feel completely incompetent, while also identifying the key things I needed to address to return to some semblance of working order. She handled this beautifully, giving me three elements on which to focus, helping me achieve a decent amount of progress with each of these in the course of the lesson, and giving me a solo exercise to practice afterwards.

Four days and 200 miles later, a private with Mabel ahead of the opening milonga. She echoed Emma’s view that tango hadn’t deserted my body, and she too felt some aspects had improved – complete with a disclaimer that she really wasn’t just being kind in saying this. Tango is a strange and mysterious creature!

She also gave me three things to work on (and snuck in a fourth at the end), one of which kind of blew my mind. For six years, I’ve been working on increasing my dissociation. Yes, teachers have told me that you don’t need much, and it’s more about a clear distinction between a flat movement and a dissociated one, but all the same … However, Mabel said that I could use less dissociation!

She had me imagine a weight hanging from the hip of my standing leg, then picture a purely internal stretch from that hip to the opposite shoulder. Not actively trying to generate any external movement, just focusing on that weight and that stretch. The result was what seemed a barely-perceptible level of dissociation, and yet Mabel followed it perfectly – as did other followers in the milonga afterwards. I didn’t use this approach all the time, only in slower and more subtle movements, but it felt fantastic!

Restoring my Argentine embrace

My last trip to Buenos Aires had solved a mystery that had puzzled me from my very first visit. Visiting followers talked in gushing terms about the quality of the embrace there, and yet from the outside, it looked really uncomfortable! Like the leaders were clamping the follower very tightly, and also almost bending the follower’s wrist back. A private with Gonzalo Robín solved this.

I’d mentioned before the need to block an unwanted extra step in movements like the ocho cortado. I’d learned that I needed to contain the embrace more to prevent this. What Gonzalo was talking about was keeping all movements this contained (with me adding the caveat, except when actively creating space for the follower’s dance). This makes the lead much more precise, and much easier to follow. It also makes the follower feel safer, because she can feel that even if she loses her axis, or we’re dancing a pivot with centrifugal energy, she’s definitely not going to fall.

As for that awkward-looking bent wrist … What Gonzalo said is that you want some degree of compression in the embrace. Teachers often talk about a rounded embrace, as if embracing a beach-ball, but I’ve always found that hard to put into practice. But now it made sense. Gonzalo said that it’s as if you’re trying to close the gap between your left and right hands. Not squeezing the follower, but also not lacking any sensation of closed-ness. Just a light compression, with additional compression when the follower is using my left hand to push against in, say, an ocho.

So the left hand is not facing diagonally forward, as is the norm in London tango, but rather fully inward, toward my right hand. As for the angle of the follower’s wrist, she actually chooses that – all the leader is doing is providing that sense of compression, containment, and leaving her to adjust the angle as she prefers. And when I followed, then I understood why followers might choose an angle which looks awkward, but feels rounded. It’s inward, not backward.

Emma noted that I’d lost some of that containment on the right, which was again particularly evident in the ocho cortado. She had me do some smaller and snappier ones to rhythmical music as a way to really draw my attention to the need to send a clear ‘here and no further’ signal. That was already making a huge difference.

Mabel built on this by having me enter the right side of the embrace in a very conscious sequence. Position my shoulder, then my upper arm, then my lower arm, and finally my hand. In this way it was impossible to have an unwanted gap in the right side of the embrace, but it still left me free to keep my lower arm relaxed so there was no sense of being clamped in place.

Any time I do work on my embrace, it always leaves me slightly nervous, so I did ask a few followers afterwards how it felt, and was duly reassured!

With two amazing lessons under my belt, I felt I had a fighting chance of making it through the festival without fatalities, and an hour later was on the floor – report to follow!